Johnson Student Center
The Cooler—a coffee shop and student hangout—was on the ground floor of the Johnson Student Center when Obama was a student. It was there that Lisa Jack ’81, then an aspiring photographer, first met him in the spring of1980 and asked the “cute” freshman to pose for her as part of her photography class with English and comparative literary studies professor Dan Fineman. The negatives then sat unnoticed in her basement for years until the 2008, presidential campaign, when she went down and dug them out. Jack’s images first appeared in Time in December 2008, when the newsmagazine proclaimed Obama its “Person of the Year.”
Images of a young Obama by Lisa Jack ‘81 were taken at the JSC Cooler and now hang in front of Haines Hall.